Quote of the Week:“No government has the right to decide on the truth of scientific principles, nor to prescribe in any way the character of the questions investigated. Neither may a government determine the aesthetic value of artistic creations, nor limit the forms of literacy or artistic expression. Nor should it pronounce on the validity of economic, historic, religious, or philosophical doctrines. Instead it has a duty to its citizens to maintain the freedom, to let those citizens contribute to the further adventure and the development of the human race.” – Richard Feynman, “The Meaning of It All: Thoughts of a Citizen Scientist”.

Number of the Week:99.99997% Certainty

It’s Not Real, It’s Puccini: Last week’s TWTW discussed that in order to fully enjoy certain types of art, such as opera and some movies, members of the audience must suspend reality. Similarly, to believe certain claims by climate scientists, one must suspend reality – including knowledge of nature. As if on cue, the Nature publishing group came out with two papers that require suspending reality and knowledge of nature.

The sun has just passed an entire calendar month with no sunspots. The last time this happened, in August 2008, the sun was in the nadir of a century-class Solar Minimum. The current stretch of blank suns shows that Solar Minimum has returned, and it could be as deep as the last one.

The last time a full calendar month passed without a sunspot was August 2008. At the time, the sun was in the deepest Solar Minimum of the Space Age. Now a new Solar Minimum is in progress and it is shaping up to be similarly deep. So far this year, the sun has been blank 73% of the time–the same as 2008.

Did you know that Australia’s rate of temperature warming per decade since 1910 has increased by 23%?

No? Neither does the Australian public, despite the Bureau of Meteorology several weeks ago releasing a new ACORN dataset of daily temperatures over the past 109 years that significantly rewrites Australia’s climate history.

ACORN 1 (Australian Climate Observations Reference Network – Surface Air Temperature) was released in 2012. The bureau has released ACORN 2 dailies, a total revision that significantly increases the warming trend calculated from the average temperatures since 1910 at 112 weather stations across the country.

Figure 1. ORIGINAL CAPTION: “Fig. 7 Average biases (model—observations) in downward solar radiation at Earth’s surface calculated in 43 CMIP5 models at 760 sites from GEBA. Units Wm−2”. The “CMIP5” is the “Computer Model Intercomparison Project 5”, the fifth iteration of a project which compares the various models and how well they perform.

I keep reading about all kinds of crazy schemes to reduce US CO2 emissions. Now, I don’t think that CO2 is the secret knob that controls the climate. I think that the earth has a host of emergent thermoregulatory mechanisms that act to keep the temperature within narrow limits (e.g. 0.6°C temperature change over the entire 20th Century). I don’t believe the claims that the modern changes in CO2 will affect the temperature.

But solely for the purposes of this post, let’s assume that the alarmists are correct. And for purposes of discussion only, let’s assume that the Earth’s temperature is free to go up and down any amount. Let’s assume that CO2 is, in fact, the secret control knob that controls the temperature of the earth. And let’s further assume that the pundits are right that the “climate sensitivity” is three degrees of warming for every doubling of CO2.

[Excess Deaths are calculated as that period’s difference from the yearly average. If there were 12,000 deaths in a typical year, or 1000 per month, and in December there were 2500, then there were 2500 – 1000 = 1500 ‘Excess Deaths’ in that December. -Bob]

More honesty and less hubris, more evidence and less dogmatism, would do a world of good

“What can I do to correct these crazy, super wrong errors?” Willie Soon asked plaintively in a recent e-chat. “What errors, Willie?” I asked.

“Errors in Total Solar Irradiance,” he replied. “The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change keeps using the wrong numbers! It’s making me feel sick to keep seeing this error. I keep telling them – but they keep ignoring their mistake.”